The Witch in History

by Purkiss; Diane

• ISBN13: 9780415087629
• ISBN10: 0415087627
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1996-10-14
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Throughout history the figure of the witch has embodied both male nightmare and female fantasy. While early modern women used belief and ritual to express and manage powerful feelings, the symbols and images surrounding the witch in the New World largely distorted the European views of Native American religions. In our own era, groups as diverse as women writers, academic historians and radical feminists have found in the witch a figure who justifies and defines their own identities. And there are many in the 1990s who still call themselves witches. From colonial narratives to court records and from Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath,The Witch in Historyshows how the witch has acted and continues to embody the fears, desires and fantasies of women and men.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Introduction	1	(6)
Part I The histories of witchcraft	7	(84)
1 A Holocaust of one's own: the myth of the Burning Times	7	(23)
2 At play in the fields of the past: modern witches	30	(29)
3 The witch in the hands of historians: a tale of prejudice and fear	59	(32)
Part II Early modern women's stories of witchcraft	91	(88)
4 The house, the body, the child	91	(28)
5 No limit: the body of the witch	119	(26)
6 Self-fashioning by women: choosing to be a witch	145	(34)
Part III Witches on stage	179	(97)
7 Elizabethan stagings: the witch, the queen, class	179	(20)
8 The all-singing, all-dancing plays of the Jacobean witch-vogue: The Masque of Queens, Macbeth, The Witch	199	(32)
9 Testimony and truth: The Witch of Edmonton and The Witches of Lancashire	231	(19)
10 The witch on the margins of `race': Sycorax and Others	250	(26)
Conclusion: bread into gingerbread and the price of transformation	276	(10)
Index	286